Japanese manufacturing: strategy and practice

A striking characteristic of Japanese factories is the extent of process control: from both the technical and the social viewpoint the labour and production system is controlled down to the very last detail. The characteristics of management and organization which underlie this are closely interwoven with Japanese culture. This explains why the work content, working conditions and working relationships in the factories look so different from those in western cultures. The paper shows why factories in the West cannot and should not copy Japanese factories

Developments in the Safety Science Domain and in Safety Management From the 1970s Till the 1979 Near Disaster at Three Mile Island

Objective: What has been the influence of general management schools and safety research into causes of accidents and disasters on managing safety from 1970 till 1979? Method: The study was limited to original articles and documents, written in English or Dutch from the period under concern. For the Netherlands, the professional journal De Veiligheid (Safety) has been consulted. Results and conclusions: Dominant management approaches started with 1) the classical management starting from the 19th century, with scientific management from the start of the 20st century as a main component. During the interwar period 2) behavioural management started, based on behaviourism, followed by 3) quantitative management from the Second World War onwards. After the war 4) modern management became important. A company was seen as an open system, interacting with an external environment with external stakeholders. These schools management were not exclusive, but have existed in the period together. Early 20th century, the U.S. 'Safety First' movement was the starting point of this knowledge development on managing safety, with cost reduction and production efficiency as key drivers. Psychological models and metaphors explained accidents from ‘unsafe acts’. And safety was managed with training and selection of reckless workers, all in line with scientific management. Supported by behavioural management, this approach remained dominant for many years, even long after World War II. Influenced by quantitative management, potential and actual disasters after the war led to two approaches; loss prevention (up-scaling process industry) and reliability engineering (inherently dangerous processes in the aerospace and nuclear industries). The distinction between process safety and occupational safety became clear after the war, and the two developed into relatively independent domains. In occupational safety in the 1970s human errors thought to be symptoms of mismanagement. The term ‘safety management’ was introduced in scientific safety literature as well as concepts as loose, and tightly coupled processes, organizational culture, incubation of a disaster and mechanisms blinding organizations for portents of disaster scenarios. Loss prevention remained technically oriented. Till 1979 there was no clear relation with safety management. Reliability engineering, based on systems theory did have that relation with the MORT technique as a management audit. The Netherlands mainly followed Anglo-Saxon developments. Late 1970s, following international safety symposia in The Hague and Delft, independent research started in The Netherland

Supporting shop floor workers with a multimedia task-oriented information system

This paper reports the work carried out as part of an industrial research project sponsored by a major telecommunication industry based in the UK. The main aim of the research was to investigate the extent to which a multimedia- based information system, developed for shop floor workers, has contributed to the increased efficiency and productivity Of manufacturing operations. To achieve this, the work has focused on the design and execution of the evaluation of the system. Due to the fact that the direct impact of the implementation of the information system developed was difficult to demonstrate, it was decided to adopt the system usage as a surrogate of the system's Success and the User acceptance of the system was evaluated using both the Technology Acceptance Model and the Task-Technology Fit model. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Action Recognition in Manufacturing Assembly using Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Production innovations are occurring faster than ever. Manufacturing workers thus need to frequently learn new methods and skills. In fast changing, largely uncertain production systems, manufacturers with the ability to comprehend workers\u27 behavior and assess their operation performance in near real-time will achieve better performance than peers. Action recognition can serve this purpose. Despite that human action recognition has been an active field of study in machine learning, limited work has been done for recognizing worker actions in performing manufacturing tasks that involve complex, intricate operations. Using data captured by one sensor or a single type of sensor to recognize those actions lacks reliability. The limitation can be surpassed by sensor fusion at data, feature, and decision levels. This paper presents a study that developed a multimodal sensor system and used sensor fusion methods to enhance the reliability of action recognition. One step in assembling a Bukito 3D printer, which composed of a sequence of 7 actions, was used to illustrate and assess the proposed method. Two wearable sensors namely Myo-armband captured both Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and electromyography (EMG) signals of assembly workers. Microsoft Kinect, a vision based sensor, simultaneously tracked predefined skeleton joints of them. The collected IMU, EMG, and skeleton data were respectively used to train five individual Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. Then, various fusion methods were implemented to integrate the prediction results of independent models to yield the final prediction. Reasons for achieving better performance using sensor fusion were identified from this study

Spatial but not verbal cognitive deficits at age 3 years in persistently antisocial individuals

Previous studies have repeatedly shown verbal intelligence deficits in adolescent antisocial individuals, but it is not known whether these deficits are in place prior to kindergarten or, alternatively, whether they are acquired throughout childhood. This study assesses whether cognitive deficits occur as early as age 3 years and whether they are specific to persistently antisocial individuals. Verbal and spatial abilities were assessed at ages 3 and 11 years in 330 male and female children, while antisocial behavior was assessed at ages 8 and 17 years. Persistently antisocial individuals (N = 47) had spatial deficits in the absence of verbal deficits at age 3 years compared to comparisons (N = 133), and also spatial and verbal deficits at age 11 years. Age 3 spatial deficits were independent of social adversity, early hyperactivity, poor test motivation, poor test comprehension, and social discomfort during testing, and they were found in females as well as males. Findings suggest that early spatial deficits contribute to persistent antisocial behavior whereas verbal deficits are developmentally acquired. An early-starter model is proposed whereby early spatial impairments interfere with early bonding and attachment, reflect disrupted right hemisphere affect regulation and expression, and predispose to later persistent antisocial behavior